mercredi 12 juillet 2017

Samsung’s dedicated hardware button for Bixby on the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+ has been met with both praise as well as criticism. Not many people actually want to use it to launch the Bixby personal assistant, but Android enthusiasts loved the idea of using a hardware remapping application to let the button be used for something else. However, a quick update pushed out by Samsung signaled their first attempt at preventing this from working.

Since people still wanted to remap the dedicated hardware button, a number of applications sprung up that attempted to bypass this new restriction. Most are apps that will just kill Bixby when it launched and then execute another application or task that you wanted. One of the applications that we featured in a video that bypassed this initial block is one called bxActions from XDA Senior Member Jawomo. It’s free, lets you remap the button to another application/task or even disable it completely.

Samsung seemed to have caught wind of these applications and are continuing to try and prevent people from remapping the dedicated Bixby button. This is likely due to them wanting to increase usage of their virtual assistant so they can better compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft in the space. So a recent update that was pushed out by T-Mobile and Sprint has started to block a number of these applications from working.

So after another attempt to prevent their own customers from using a dedicated button the way they want, Jawomo started to look into the update and has adapted their bxActions application to bypass this restriction yet again. You can find the APK for the latest bxActions update in our Galaxy S8 forum linked below, or you can grab it directly from the Play Store.